


trying to find the in-betweens

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drabble Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-06-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:57:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 12,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A disjointed collection of AUs I will never finish. Pairings vary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis – Wally is a vampire and Artemis is a vampire hunter"

“I could do this all night,” Artemis calls to the empty, gutted living room. It’s nearly pitch black inside from the boarded-up windows, but she holds the stake of juniper wood steadily in front of her with one hand, the other carefully balancing a pair of silver bells. 

“I know you could,” a voice answers, sounding strained. “But like… don’t? Please?” 

In response, she gives the bells a stiff ring, and she hears an unearthly noise from a corner, a combination of a screech and a shout that makes her skin fizzle. 

“Don’t like that much, do you?” she mutters, stalking slightly forward. “I’ve got a whole bag of rice, too, if you’re interested.” 

“Oh…  _jeez_ ,” the voice whimpers. “Go away.” 

“No can-do,” she retorts, nudging a wall with her knuckles when she comes up against it. “Six people in this town have died in the last week and you’re the first vamp I’ve found kicking around, so you’re toast. Sorry.” 

“What makes you so sure?”

She shrugs, smirking. “Well, I’m me. That kind of ruins your chances.”

Something swoops behind her and she whirls, stake at the ready, to find only emptiness. Her eyes are adjusting to the absolute darkness, enough to see a few photograph frames lying dusty on the wide floor. Their subjects are indistinguishable. 

“Show your face,” she barks. “It kinda ruins the fun if I can’t look you in the eye.” 

“Fine.” The air behind her swells with presence, and she turns swiftly, her wrist colliding immediately with a cold throat, slamming it against the nearest wall and holding it there with the stake. 

Breathless from adrenaline, she squints at what she’s pinned – a boy, externally no older than she, whose freckles look almost black against his pallid skin. She thinks his hair is red, but she knows it’s unkempt. He looks frightened, but not in the same way most vampires do when she’s about to nix them – he looks  _afraid_. 

“I swear it’s not me,” he insists. “I feed on like, cows. And deer sometimes. But mostly cows. And a horse, once, and—”

“Quiet,” Artemis hisses, and for good measure, she shakes the bells once. They ring clearly and the boy’s face screws up in pain, and he hisses, squirming, pawing at his ears. Artemis draws the stake down until its point is over his heart. “I’m gonna make this nice and quick.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "princess diaries au; it's hard enough for artemis to refrain from punching the school snob- and now she's supposed to run a country?"

Artemis sprints down the block to the school, halting every few seconds to try tying the laces of her left sneaker. Her hair flies out wildly behind her and her glasses are crooked and some of Jade’s fur is still matted on her blazer and she still smells a little bit like Uncle Oliver’s lime air freshener from the villa, and she so wishes that she could do that prim walk (that he’d been insisting on trying to teach her without Dinah’s help) right now, but she’s late for school and princesses shouldn’t be late for school and oh crap she thinks she forgot her World Civ homework. 

She flies around the corner without looking where she’s going, and she almost smashes into Zatanna and Wally, who, apparently, are  _also_  indulging in tardiness. Or, well, okay, she avoids hitting Zatanna but in redirecting herself, she manages to plow straight into Wally. 

Zatanna’s already chortle-snorting when they both hit the pavement, and Artemis is saved from being thrown forward and probably breaking her neck by Wally managing to brace her at the shoulders. Her half-open backpack is not as kind, spewing her pens and stapler out over the concrete. 

“Nice turn, Swan Queen,” Zatanna cackles. “See, Wally, she’s here; can we  _please_ go to homeroom before this gets put on our permanent records?”

Wally’s breath smells like M&Ms when he jerks his eyes off of Artemis’s and splutters out, “Yes, right, okay,” and gingerly pushes Artemis off of him. 

“Why aren’t you guys in class?” Artemis asks a bit abrasively, wincing at her skinned knee. Oliver’s going to  _kill_  her for blemishing her princees-joints and she doubts the burgundy school uniform socks will be much help, either. 

“Because he wouldn’t stop flipping out about where you were,” Zatanna replies immediately, grabbing her at the wrist and hoisting her up. “He was like, ‘Oh no, what if she’s been assassinated? What if the anti-Vlatavan coalitions that  _apparently just decided to exist_  mowed her down before she hit the bus stop?’ All I’m saying is, he  _definitely_  didn’t get that neurotic stuff from  _my_  side of the family.”

Artemis flushes, glancing at Wally’s rumpled blazer and tie and general disheveled appearance thanks to their collision, but instead she forces herself to snap her attention back to Zatanna. 

“Can you not mention that whole… Vlatava plus me thing when we’re out in public?” she hisses. “ _Secret of international importance_ , and all?” 

Zatanna shrugs flippantly, smoothing back her French braid. 

“Yes, your Highness,” she snips back, which makes Artemis bristle.

“Okay, can we go now?” Wally calls, already ten paces ahead of them. Zatanna and Artemis groan in unison before jogging to catch up to him. 

Artemis tries to keep herself from screaming. Six more days. Just six more days of this secret-keeping crap, and then she can tell Uncle Oliver that she has no intention of going back to Vlatava, and no intention of packing Jade into a carrier for an international flight, and no intention of learning how to balance a single more book on her head. 

She likes her knees better scabbed, anyway. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "uhm, spitfire, in a universe where sportsmaster is part of the good guys, and the justice league is part of the bad, and artemis never left her father's side."

“Artemis, watch out!” Jade shouts from across the room, but Artemis barely has time to move before she’s been smashed into by a red-and-black blur, knocked several feet back into a pile of boxes.

She groans, her head throbbing, and grits her teeth as she tries to get to her feet again. Before she can push herself up, she’s shoved to the ground again by her shoulders and feels a weight bearing over her.

She wrenches her eyes open and snarls at her opponent: a smug-looking redheaded boy no older than she is, whose eyes are obscured by dark red goggles. She glances at his chest to see a scarlet lightning bolt emblazoned over his black suit. 

“Wow,” he says lazily. “The League  _really_  must be starved for new members.”

“Funny,” Artemis hisses in response, “I was just about to say the same to you.”

“So what do they call you?” he inquires. “Besides fresh meat, I mean.”

Artemis growls and twists out from under him, tucking her feet under his torso and kicking him violently off of her. He bounces back onto his feet in an instant, but she’s already backflipped her way to the top of the box pile that hadn’t been broken by her earlier impact.

“Artemis,” she snarls back, swiftly nocking an arrow and firing it straight at his head. He zips away before she’s even let it loose, and it lands on the floor and explodes. 

“Yeah, and I’m Speedy Gonzales,” he drawls sarcastically. “Seems a little stupid, picking your real name for an alias.”

Artemis’ eyes widen. “How did you know th—”

“You just told me.” He grins wickedly at her, pushing his hair back, where it stands on end. “Well. That, and  _our_  League gets pretty decent intel from yours. Since you guys don’t really bother encrypting your files. I also know that your mom is—”

“ _Shut up_!” Artemis shrieks, yanking two arrows out of her quiver and aiming them at him. He dodges them again, staring lazily at the ceiling. 

“So tell me,  _Artemis_ …” he begins, and in a blink, she’s been knocked over again, pinned to the floor more effectively than before. Kid Flash smirks down at her, and she can see freckles on his nose. “What’s a nice girl like you doing with the good guys?”

“I’d hope you could figure that out,  _Kid_ ,” she bites back, her eyes narrowing. 

“Oh, trust me,” he says quietly, with relish, “I’ve figured out  _plenty_  about you.”

“Kid!” a man’s voice barks in the distance, and Artemis thinks she can see the supervillain known as the Flash calling to Kid Flash. “We’re moving out!”

“Goods retrieved,” another voice adds with glee, and it’s a much younger voice, coming from above her – she sees a fleeting shadow closely resembling the ninja known as Robin leaping across the rafters toward the exit. “Victory is ours, et  _cetera_.”

Kid Flash returns his attention to Artemis, and his eyelids lower behind the red-tinted lenses of the goggles. She grits her teeth at him, sneering. 

“Gotta run, babe,” he says, and before she can protest, he’s leaned down to her ear. “I’ll let you go, just this once.”

Artemis lets out a yell of fury and wrenches her arm out of his grip, intending to punch him, but he’s already gone as if he hadn’t been there at all, leaving behind a breeze that rustles her hair. 

Jade is beside her in an instant, followed by their father. 

“You okay, Art?” Jade demands, pulling Artemis to her feet and putting a hand on her forehead. 

“Yeah, I’m good,” Artemis replies bitterly, dropping her bow to the ground. 

Sportsmaster sighs, pats her shoulder, and puts a finger on his comm. “Mission was a failure. The Other League’s gotten back the Cobra Venom. Yeah. We were ambushed by Flash and Kid Flash, along with Batman and Robin. Right. Yeah, they’re both fine. We’ll be returning to base.”

“Jade, I’m fine!” Artemis snaps, swatting her sister’s fussing hands away. “He didn’t even hit me.”

Jade’s eyebrows furrow. “He didn’t?”

“No,” Artemis replies churlishly, glaring at the wide open exit door. She thinks she sees a lean black figure in the trees beyond, but it’s gone in an instant, topped by a smear of auburn. “He didn’t.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Whoever you want, Great Gatsby AU"

“It’s a little  _unusual_ ,” Wally commented dryly, watching the group of enthusiastic Charleston dancers with disinterest. “Hosting parties like this and not actually attending them. Not exactly your usual example of etiquette.”

“Mr. Grayson likes keeping an air of mystery,” Artemis replied with vague amusement, lazily stirring her martini. “It’s part of his charm.”

Wally had only really known Artemis for a few days, having been gleefully introduced to her by his cousin Barbara upon his arrival to West Egg the weekend prior, but already she had taken it upon herself to escort him around his neighbor Richard Grayson’s lavish party as though they were old friends. He’d heard his share of rumors about her – a prominent celebrity in the athletic archery world who was known for her elegant style of cheating – but none of them compared to those he’d heard about the host of the party.

Throughout the course of the evening, he’d gleaned enough information to deduce that Richard Grayson was a spy, a bootlegger, a German, an oil tycoon, a circus runaway, a Russian count, born into money, a previous hobo building his fortune from nothing, and a general enigma.

Wally had seen Grayson maybe once or twice, but it was always an indistinct silhouette cut against the moon, facing toward the blinking green light at the end of Barbara’s dock. He had never spoken to him, however, and that was probably why he had been astonished to receive an invitation to one of his famous parties. After all, he was just renting the simple little cabin next door to Grayson’s estate for the summer, and he’d had no intention of speaking to his neighbor. But Artemis had insisted, as had Barbara and her husband, who were off getting champagne. 

Artemis let out a groan and tossed her head back, and her gold bob bounced under her silver fascinator.

“Ugh, this is all colossally boring,” she grumbled. “I’ve been to enough of Dick’s stupid parties to last me a lifetime and believe me, they get pretty old pretty quickly.”

“I somehow can’t imagine that happening,” Wally said as a highly inebriated flapper did a cartwheel into the fountain. 

He felt someone tap his shoulder and turned automatically to Artemis, expecting it to be her, but she was staring sleepily up at the stars with her arms folded. He glanced over his shoulder to see one of the many butlers standing expectantly behind him.

“Uh,” Wally stammered. “Yes?”

“Mr. Grayson would like to see you, sir,” the man said evenly. 

Artemis laughed, a rasping sound that curled out into the summer air.

“Ooh, you’re a lucky man, Wally,” she snickered, but Wally didn’t hear her. His attention had been caught by a figure standing between the open curtains of the upstairs window – a slender, discerning young man with dark hair and a curious smirk, wearing a tuxedo, staring decisively down at him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis. Wally and Artemis are both special agents trying to catch a criminal who Artemis used to have a relationship with."

“So you didn’t think it’d be a good idea,” Wally yells furiously, “to mention that you had—you had  _relations_  with our mark?! What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking ‘Less Backstory, More Shut-Up-and-Catch-Him!’” Artemis retorts, undoing her gun holster and tossing it onto the hotel room chair. She’s making a point not to look at him. “Like it really  _matters_ , West; as long as we get him in custody, it doesn’t—”

“It  _does_  matter,” he interrupts, his voice quieter, but much more spiteful. It makes her stop, her hands hovering over the buttons of her shirt. “That’s where you’re wrong. And thanks to you, Mahkent got away, and he killed two civilians. I’d  _love_  to see you explain that one to the boss.” 

“What do you mean, thanks to me?!” she snaps, whirling on him. “You’re the one who had the shot! You could’ve taken it!”

He meets her without backing down, his face maybe an inch or so from hers and twisted with anger.

“God, forgive me for not being a trained killer from the time I was nine!” he barks, and Artemis’s shoulders go rigid. “Boss wants him alive. Or prefers him that way. I guess you left out the part where you  _screwed_  this guy for the better part of two years. Nice show of loyalty and honesty there, Crock.” 

Artemis has to physically keep herself from spitting on his face. Instead, she settles for punching him, hard, across the face, with a  _crack_  that bounces against the taupe wallpaper. 

“Get out,” she hisses. “Get out of here before I get it in my mind to shoot you.” 

Wally’s doubled over, one hand clutching his cheek, the other resting on his knee. Artemis breathes in and out through her nose, her nails digging into her palms, and waits. Finally, he straightens up, wiping a trickle of blood from his lower lip and looking her in the eye.

She almost balks. There is disappointment in the green, and indignation, and hurt and spite and a hundred other things that make her stomach curdle.

“Thanks for that, partner,” he murmurs, low and deliberate.

Artemis silently watches him take his suit coat and slam the door behind him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Artemis, something like a Catch Me If You Can AU; Artemis is a con artist who runs away from home and is constantly changing personas (and forging checks) and Dick is the agent assigned to stop her and bring her in"

“So,” Dick sighs, his hands in his pockets. “Here we are again. What’s your name today?” 

The blonde straightens, tentatively, her hand falling away from the knob of the locked door. The last time he’d seen her, her hair had been black, cropped at the ears, swept across her forehead. 

“Corinne,” she murmurs. “Corinne Anders. Hi, Grayson. Last time I saw you was in Blüdhaven.” 

“Why not just stay Artemis Crock?” he asks. “Much easier for our records, and all.” 

“Don’t call me that,” she hisses, her eyes narrowing dangerously. “That one’s special. You can’t use yet.” 

“Special because it’s the name your dad gave you?” Dick asks, his hand straying for his gun on instinct at the mounting rage in her gaze.

She bristles harshly. 

“That’s none of your business,” she snarls. “Let me out.”

“Not until you answer a couple of questions. Which will probably end in you being taken downtown. And locked up.”

“How about that. The bird’s sticking  _me_  in the cage.” She laughs, emptily, tossing her head back. “Like you could ever pin me down, Grayson.”

“Would you like to test that?” he asks, his voice low, stepping towards her.

His hand brushes against hers, and she sighs quietly out through her nose, locking her eyes with his.

He feels her hand slip into his pocket when she kisses him, her tongue pressing to the cut on his lip, but he doesn’t react, doesn’t even move. He holds her for maybe fifteen seconds, tops, before she breaks away as quickly as she’d put mouth on his, unlocking the door in one rapid motion.

“Catch me if you can, detective,” she whispers into his ear, and she nips at the lobe for just an instant, and he closes his eyes so he won’t have to watch her slip away. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Artemis, film noir or spies AU"

“They said you were dead,” he murmurs, flicking his cigarette down onto the cobblestones and snuffing it with the toe of one scuffed shoe. The streetlamp is the only source of light in the alleyway, splaying feeble and sickly yellow across their faces, across  _her_  face.

“I’d say I look a bit better than  _that_ , wouldn’t you?” she jibes. There is a wickedly amused smirk on her face, on the face he’d told himself time and again was pallid and cold at the bottom of a lake somewhere. Her gray eyes are alight with something he’s never seen before, and it’s frightening and it’s alluring and he doesn’t know which to act on.

“Come on,” she says. “You’re the best private dick around; I’d expected you to have a gut feeling, at the  _very_  least.”

“Private dick,” he mutters. “How original.” He pulls the brim of his fedora down and it obscures his face as he bows his head. “I didn’t want to get entangled in something like that. Denial. It’s unhealthy in my profession.”

“I was hoping,” she murmurs, “that by hiring you to protect me, you’d get to know me a bit more. Enough to realize I wouldn’t die unless I wanted to. I left you clues. I did.”

“And I saw them!” he barks, sharply; it rings against the drizzle and the stone and she stiffens instinctively. “But I couldn’t follow them, Artemis; I couldn’t. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand,” she replies harshly. “You just didn’t care. You could have told me that from the get-go.”

“Damn it,” he hisses under his breath. “Damn it, I always cared. I just didn’t want to lose my head. It would’ve driven me insane.”

“Haven’t you heard?” she whispers, and there are something like tears in her voice now.

He looks up, and she’s standing in front of him, the dull light flickering against her cheek; the rest of her is shrouded in shadow, but her sad smile is painted across her face in what seems like a hundred hues. He reaches a wavering hand up and rests it on her cheek, where she leans into it, closing her eyes. The smile broadens.

“We’re all mad here,” he says, quietly, understandingly. It’s the smartest thing he’s ever said. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Artemis, in which it's Artemis's love that's unrequited instead of Dick's"

“Zatanna kissed me yesterday,” Robin tells her with palpable smugness, kicking his legs over the edge of the fire escape she and he are perched on. The late-night Gotham traffic mills below them, an indistinct line of reds and yellows and oily, rain-slicked black.

Artemis’s grip on her shawarma infinitesimally tightens. “And you’re telling me this why? I’m not gonna give you a medal.”

“Well, you should,” he giggles, sounding giddy. “So listen. I don’t throw this word around  _super_  often, but she’s  _preeeetty_  amazing.” 

“I’m so proud of you,” Artemis mutters. “You’re finally becoming a man.”

She’s kissed nearly every boy on the Team, except for Conner (for obvious reasons) and Robin himself, since she’d first seen the look behind the skinny boy’s domino mask the day Zatanna visited the Cave. And they’re all fine, a line of lips and teeth that maybe feel like his when she closes her eyes hard enough, but they don’t cackle at strange things and they don’t make swinging from monkey bars look like art, and they have never seen her cry the way he has, and they don’t make her texting bill skyrocket, and they don’t make her stomach start to twist. 

“I think I might pursue this avenue,” he says with rampant satisfaction. “It  _may_  yield favorable results. You’re the only one I’ve told, by the way. Bask in my trust. Bask.”

And every day, she basks. But she can never tell him that. She can never tell him that she knows that he’s the one in that photo with her, unmasked and beaming; and she can never tell him that she’s kept it, after a year, and looked at it some nights in the dark when she can’t sleep. 

“Shut up,” she murmurs, punching him in the arm harder than she should. The contact makes her knuckles start to crawl. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dick/Artemis, "post-apocalyptic AU"

Dick had crouched on the jutting protrusion of torn-up stone at the summit of Wayne Tower and watched Gotham burn. 

It hadn’t been the first city to do it. It won’t be the last. By now, it’s only smoldering, its rocky broken spine jutting into the dark without repent. The bare black skeletons of the buildings are crumbling away in the wind, and Dick sometimes wonders what would have been different if the Batcave hadn’t been immune to the bombs, if he had dissolved into nothing just as so many other people had. 

He had loved after-the-bomb stories as a kid. He had picked apart the fascinating possibility of starting over from scratch, of watching his earthly attachments melt away beneath him. But he has been surveying the destruction from his perch for days, and suddenly it is no longer fascinating but gut-curdling, because he doesn’t know where she is; he doesn’t even know if she made it, but she had promised him last year that if the world began to burn, she would meet him at the top of Wayne tower and they would share the view. 

“I’ll find you,” she had assured him sleepily, and maybe she hadn’t even been aware of what she’d been saying, because it had been after a mission and they’d been ingrained with dirt and sweat and she had smelled like blood. “You won’t even have to do any of the work. You should be thrilled.”

He hugs his knees to his chest and squints out at the gray horizon, and he thinks, maybe she’s gone but didn’t suffer, and maybe she fired her arrows into the air and imagined that they would carry her into the clear, clean galaxy with them. 

It had seemed such an inconsequential promise at the time, as he had blinked tentatively at the satisfied tilt of her full smirk and the twisting trail of matted gold hair that ran down her back – they had made a lot of inconsequential promises in their time, now that he thinks about it.

He closes his eyes and waits, and the silence bears down on him like a storm. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dick/Artemis, _Inception_ AU (unprompted)

“If I jump,” she whispers, “will I wake up?”

The wind is rustling through her blonde hair like a cautious hand, making her leather jacket flutter around her waist as she teeters on the edge of the skyscraper. The ground is miles below, absolute miles, if there is even a ground at all – the sky above them is shaking and crumbling, turning gray, and her bare feet brush against the stone. Her hands hang limp at her sides.

Dick Grayson watches her in silence. He hadn’t intended for her to realize he is standing behind her, but she has always had a sense for his presence, ever since they first went under five years ago as teenagers. As prodigies. They had turned the streets on their sides and pressed their fingers against the cusp of the skies and turned the oceans into glass.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he tells her nonchalantly, expertly masking the white-hot panic banging against his ribs. “It’s an awfully long drop.”

“But it’s only a dream.” She finally turns her head to gaze at him over her shoulder, and her gray eyes are empty. There is desperation lurking in their inscrutable depths, but it recedes. “Isn’t it?”

She used to be so sharp, so eager to build and create and subsequently ruin with a single flutter of her eyelashes. But her face is drawn and her fingers are shivering and she is barely upright, hardly separate from the infinite fall before her. Dick remembers her raising her hands and molding blankness into trees and stars, her eyes a frantic compass, her face hewn in the stone of her heart.

Dick steps toward her and she flinches, swaying. He halts immediately, his bones aching. There is a tempest brewing around them, tearing the stone from the buildings, ripping the clouds apart with a howling sound that makes his stomach churn.

“I want to wake up,” she tells him in a voice so small and broken that he wants nothing more than to hold it in his hands and mend it, hush it, keep it warm.

“You can,” he assures her quietly, and he sees a flash of her laughing, spreading her arms at the edge of a dock and leaping into the depths. She shakes her head.

“You may be the best liar in the business,” she murmurs, “but you still can’t fool me, Dick Grayson.”

A smile twitches onto his lips.

“I wouldn’t try to fool you, ’Mis,” he lies coolly. He knows that if she jumps, she will crumple in the dream world and go limp in the real one, too deep into her own imagination to ever recover. He had come in to find her, and he had clawed desperately through the brambles of her subconscious, plowed his way through remnants of her memory that were scattered through the dreamscape like broken glass.

She lets out a raw breath that could be equal to laughter, pushing her hair out of her eyes with one trembling hand.

“You would,” she insists. “You  _are_.”

“I’m here to bring you home,” Dick says as calmly as he can, resisting the infuriating urge to surge forward and embrace her and carry her back into the waking world in his arms as if she weighs nothing at all. There is dissonant music playing somewhere, in his voice, a lullaby he had sung to her in Mombasa when she had bled from a bullet wound. “We can go back to the way things were. You and me. Partners.”

Artemis fully turns to face him, her frame fragile and open, daring him to reach for her, daring him to move. Her hair whips around her face violently. Her jacket flaps and her bare toes curl. She is looking him straight in the eye, and he is almost awake, as though punched into consciousness.

“Liar,” she murmurs. She spreads her arms out, and her shirt fans out around them like a sheet. She is crying.

He starts to move toward her, sensing her decision, his nimble legs carrying him forward.

“Dick,” she whispers, “I’m going to wake up now.”

“No—” Dick starts to shout, but she closes her eyes, her lips shuddering, her cheeks moist.

“I’m going to wake up now,” she repeats with absolute serenity, and then slowly, achingly, she tips backwards, spread-eagled and graceful, and Dick screams out her name, but the thunder drowns it out.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Artemis, any Disney movie AU"

“Of course I’m distraught!” Artemis shrieks, leaping behind a tree trunk. “I’m a  _frog_!”

“So it would seem,” the wry-faced prince Dick agrees, hopping smoothly after her. “But you’re not the  _only_  one suffering from this problem.”

“This is  _your_  fault!” Artemis snaps, trying to kick him and failing, toppling over into the swamp. She splutters when she resurfaces, glowering murderously up at him. She never would have imagined that a frog could look so smug. “That’s what I get for kissing frogs and – and letting Megan tell me it’d be  _romantic_ —”

“Oh, calm yourself, woman,” Dick chides her with a roll of his eyes, extending one amphibian hand to help her out of the muck. She swats it aside. “What’s life without a little adventure?”

“I’ll kill you, your  _highness_ ,” Artemis hisses, bouncing up onto the ground to crouch beside him, and she won’t admit that hopping around a swamp with Gotham’s snot-nosed little prince is maybe a little preferable to waitressing until her knees give out. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis, _The Hunger Games_ AU"

Artemis tries never to make promises. She tries never to run away, and she tries never to be scared. She holds Robin’s head in her hands and promises him that nothing is ever over, the same way she had promised Conner that if he had waited a little longer he could have seen the full moon over the arena – Robin’s blue eyes shift languidly and distantly away from hers, sliding to the mist-white sky and the rustling black leaves of the trees, and he says (with the corners of his mouth,  _red_ , upturned), “I don’t believe you. But thank you.”

The cannon cracks out through the foggy air and Artemis forces herself to lift her hands away from him, forces herself to stand (and her knees pop and wobble), forces herself to turn away from his small and prone form and his blankly gazing eyes, forces herself to run back into the trees, her quiver thudding against her back.

* * *

She isn’t supposed to care. She is supposed to survive. She is supposed to breathe. She isn’t supposed to kill anyone unless she has to. She does not kill because she wants to. She kills because she must.

She is sprinting through the trees, and their branches and leaves blur past her as her side cramps horribly; she can hear the rapid footfalls of Frost behind her, and as she turns her head to look beside her, she sees him.

Wally’s legs are so long and so impossibly strong that they carry him in leaps and bounds like a deer, his red hair tearing through the dreary landscape, his vivid freckles like dark stones against pallor. Frost is after them both.

She hasn’t seen Wally since the night before, when she had found herself taking shelter in the same grimy cave that he was. She hasn’t seen Wally since he had looked her in the eye and told her that if it came down to the two of them, he didn’t have to win. She hasn’t seen Wally since—

Frost’s footsteps are growing more distant, slower, but Artemis does not permit herself to decelerate, panting so loudly and raggedly that she can hear nothing else, but at least it is  _breath_ ; at least it is  _life_. She swerves rapidly toward a cluster of pines, finally coming to rest against the trunk of one of them, collapsing into its cool bark. She resists every temptation to sink to the forest floor, digging her fingernails into the moss, gritting her teeth to quiet her breathing.

A twig snaps to her right and she sharply nocks her arrow, aiming it at the bushes with wild eyes. Wally steps slowly out, hands in the air, face smeared with dirt and sweat. She lowers the weapon.

“What are you doing here?” she whispers. Wally’s hands, still raised, twitch, and he lowers them jerkily.

“Keeping an eye on you,” he replies breathlessly. “This would be so  _boring_  if we didn’t stick together.”

“We’d be better off separately,” Artemis growls.

Wally sighs quietly, starting to shuffle toward her.

“Come on; don’t lie to yourself. You’d be lost without m—…”

Artemis hadn’t been looking at him, but her head whips around when she hears his voice cut off abruptly, when she hears the whistle of a projectile through the air, the crunch of it through bone.

Her eyes reach Wally’s. They are wide, staring at her in shock, in fear. Slowly, puzzled, he looks down, sees the metal of the spear protruding from his left side.

“No,” Artemis hears herself say as Wally looks back up at her for the briefest of moments before pitching forward.

The trees grow blurry and the sky dissolves and Artemis can see  _everything_ , the telltale flash of bluish hair in the underbrush several feet behind Wally, and she has raised her bow and arrow and fired six arrows before she can even register where she is aiming; she sees Frost stand, her trembling hands seizing at the arrows scattered across her front, and fall, spread-eagled, back into the mud, unmoving. The cannon fires.

“I’m still alive,” a small voice quavers out from the ground, and Artemis falls to her knees beside Wally, carefully turning him over and putting her hands on either side of his head, her thumbs resting in the corners of his eyes. He is smiling faintly at her, looking dazed. “That’s pretty… hardcore.”

Artemis doesn’t say anything. She can’t say anything. Wally’s hand weakly lifts, his fingers finding her knuckles and resting there weightlessly. He gazes up at her, unfaltering.

“Odds,” he croaks, and there is a trickle of blood burbling down his cheek. “In your favor… and… all of that…”

Artemis shakes her head silently, once, twice, three times, and Wally presses down on her hand, wanly grinning.

“Congratulations,” he murmurs. “Your mom’ll be – proud.”

He reaches, arm palpitating, up, and entangles his fingers lightly in her ragged braid, his eyes growing glassy. Artemis clenches his head harder, curls forward and presses her forehead to his, and his hand drops to the grass.

The cannon fires.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis in the _Leverage_ universe"

“I want to do the right thing,” Artemis insists through gritted teeth, and then, louder, in a shriek, so that it cracks the glacial air in half, “ _I want to do the right thing_!” 

“Artemis, stop,” Wally grasps her at the shoulders but she wrenches out, bumping against an icy wall, the light on her helmet splaying illumination into his face until he squints. “ _Artemis_ —”

“I don’t care what Dick says,” she whispers. “It’s not the same for him. He’s grown up learning not to care and I did too but I – I want to change that now. I want to be like—” She swallows, and the word breaks in the back of her throat. “You.” 

The rawness that she’s presenting to him, beating between the ruins of the walls she’s built around herself with blistered hands, floors him. He breathes in and out, quietly, but it fogs up the air blatantly. The corpse they’re trying to return to his family lies a few feet away. 

He moves toward her cautiously and she doesn’t shy away, fixing him with a daring glare, unblinking in the cold. He pulls her, slowly, closer, and encircles her shoulders with his arms, and holds her. Her whole body shakes, but she doesn’t draw away. 

And Wally wants to tell her that she doesn’t want to be like him. She doesn’t want to care about people so much that she can never rescind the attachment she hands them, the way it breaks in two when they’re inevitably torn from her. She doesn’t want to come home from school to hear from her uncle that her parents are missing. She doesn’t want any of that. 

But maybe he does, he reconsiders. He knows nothing about her, except for the way her eyes darken when a job involves sisters, or the way she’d nearly beaten with bloody fists that businessman father who’d tried to off his daughter for her estate. 

“Okay,” he murmurs against her hair as her shuddering starts to calm. “We’ll ignore Dick’s orders. We’ll do it.” 

He draws away, and moves to fix the rope, and Artemis only stays behind for a few seconds before crouching down beside him, her eyes red at the edges but otherwise not betraying her. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis, _Mr. and Mrs. Smith_ AU"

“You’re a liar,” she snarls at him, the barrel of her gun aimed unwaveringly at the point between his eyes. He smirks.

“It’s a big club,” he says back, all bitterness, all professionalism. He leans forward, just barely, and his gun brushes against her forehead. She stiffens, but doesn’t move.

Slowly, he shifts the gun slightly and pushes a few strands of loose hair out of her face. It makes her shudder. He moves on, sliding the very end of the barrel down her temple and her cheek and across her lips, and his smirk fades as he does it. She’s never seen him like this. The metal snags on her chapped lower lip and her mouth thins. She hadn’t realized that she’s shaking.

“I’d say we’re pretty good members,” he says, low and contemplative and deliberate. “Wouldn’t you?” 

She doesn’t know which of them lowers their gun first. Maybe they do it at the same time. But the way his mouth tastes on hers when he grabs her face and she presses her palms against his back is like everything she’s been missing, everything she’s forgotten. Christmas morning, she thinks vaguely. 

This is the worst idea they’ve ever had. Worse, even, than getting married. 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Roy/Jade, wherein she is good and he is bad"

Jade is not used to the proverbial Shadows. She is used to the common ones, the ones that settle beneath her bed when the moon fades from the night sky; she thrives in them like a flower in the sunlight, and they lift her. 

The real ones, though – the proper ones, a conglomerate of figurative darkness and devilry – they startle her. Throw her off her game. Though that may have more to do with the fact that one of their best agents, the Red Arrow, has her pinned to a wall, but only because she’d let him do it, out of curiosity. 

“Stay out of our way,” he growls at her, and his eyes are white slits in the domino mask. 

Jade gives him a brief blinking glance at her smirk before she twists swiftly out of his grip and spins him around until he’s the one pressed to the wood, and it’s her arm against his throat. 

“You’re the only one here, Red,” she tells him. “I hope it’s okay if I bring you back to League headquarters for some questions?” 

Questions involving the location of her AWOL younger sister, for starters, recruited to the Shadows by their absentee mother earlier that year. But she doesn’t plan to get into details. She just wants her sister home.

“That might be a problem, kid,” he snarls, and he kicks her right in the knee. She lets out a yelp of pain as her legs buckle and Red Arrow shoves past her, knocking her to the ground with his bow. She rolls over as best she can and tosses a sai in his direction, but it misses him, thwacking into the opposite wall.

“Count yourself lucky,” he murmurs darkly over his shoulder as she clutches her throbbing knee. “If I hadn’t just broken both of Kid Flash’s arms, I would’ve slit your throat.”

Jade’s throat closes up and she glares up at his retreating form with every ounce of spite in her body.  _Next time_ , she thinks. Next time.  


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Roy/Jade, Hogwarts AU"

“Slytherin,” he mutters under his breath, seated in one of the black armchairs in front of the green flames of the fireplace. “I’m in  _Slytherin_. Bloody  _Slytherin_.” 

“Still moping over that, are you?” a voice coos from behind him.

He whirls around in the chair to see the girl who had smirked at him earlier during the Sorting, her black mane no less tamed now than it was then. She’s standing at the foot of the staircase to the girls’ dormitory, leaning against a pillar, already wearing her uniform for the next day.

“Classes don’t start until tomorrow,” he says, folding his arms and shifting back around.

“It  _is_  tomorrow, handsome,” she snickers, and Roy’s ears go red at the nickname. “You’ve been whining all night. Don’t tell me you’re  _ashamed_  to be in the house of ambition and cunning.” 

“I just didn’t think I’d end up here,” Roy grumbles, his eyes flicking to the cold stone floor. The air shifts beside him and he glances up to see that the girl is now standing at his shoulder, combing her fingers pensively through her hair. 

“Regardless,” she says airily, “at least you  _are_  here.” 

She sits down on the arm of the chair, smirking at him. Roy knows he should turn away, but he doesn’t; knows he should give the excuse of having to go to Quidditch tryouts – but he doesn’t. Instead he sits there, and the girl with him, and they watch the uncanny fire and say nothing and it’s the most comfortable Roy has felt since he’d arrived on the transfer student train. 


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Wally, in which Nabu never released Wally from the Helmet of Fate"

“I know you’re in there somewhere,” Dick ekes out, physically wrestling the shake out of his voice as he stares down Dr. Fate. “And I just wanted to let you know that we’re gonna figure this out. I’ve been talking to Batman, and Red Tornado says that—”

“Relent, child,” Dr. Fate interrupts, and he can hear a piece of Wally’s voice at the very back, rageful and raw and older than he remembers; his tongue starts to taste sour at the sound. “He has pledged himself to Nabu. You must allow yourself to move on.”

“Your parents still haven’t cleared out your room,” Dick shouts over him, his eyes locked on the empty green behind the gold surface of the Helmet. “They’re counting on you to come back, so don’t disappoint them; it’s rude.” 

“Richard Grayson, I will not release him,” Dr. Fate insists, his eerie tones booming through the night as the wind cuts across the top of the tower upon which they’re standing. “You were not even present here when he donned the Helmet. He cannot hear you.” 

“It was your birthday yesterday!” Dick yells, his eyes finally wrenching closed. “Megs burned the cake because she couldn’t quit crying, so I hope you’re proud of yourself! I  _know_  you can hear me in there, Wally; quit messing around and just—”

“Leave this place.” And this time, though it is Nabu’s words that come out, it is Wally’s voice alone that speaks them, hollowed out and dark around the edges, and Dick freezes, his breath heaving in and out. “You are of no concern to me any longer. I fight for Fate, and I fight for Order. I do not fight for you.” 

“Just let him out,” Dick says through gritted teeth, as evenly as he can, but his voice is cracking now and he can’t do a thing to stop it. “This isn’t fair. He has a life. There are people who love him; he has a  _family_.”

“Are you among those?” Nabu demands, still using Wally’s voice as though holding it on strings (Dick feels nauseous with rage). 

Something in Dick’s chest goes steely at the question, and he clenches his fists so tightly that they start to shake at his diminutive sides.

“You expect me to speak openly with you when you cannot speak openly with me?” Wally – Nabu – _Fate_  demands. “You are nothing but a child. Do not come here again, Richard Grayson. He is no longer yours.” 

With that, Dr. Fate turns away from him, and Dick wonders if the red hair beneath the Helmet has gone flat in the months and months since he had last seen it. A frigid wind tears through the air and Dick jerks his head up emphatically, every bone shaking.

“He is!” he shouts, so loudly that it makes his voice go raspy and raw. 

Dr. Fate halts, his cape wavering in the moonlight. Dick drops his hands to his sides, his eyebrows upturned.

“Please,” he whispers. “Please just let me see him.” 

Dr. Fate does not turn around. The silence that passes is tumultuous, and Dick can’t even tell if his heart is beating anymore or not. 

Finally, he speaks, and it echoes through the earth and the sky like a gavel falling.

“No.”

Fate is gone, then, vanishing into the distance, a dull glimmer of gold against the stars, and Dick, with a wretched noise dredged up from deep inside, falls to his knees. 


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Wally, _The Host_ AU"

It’s Wally, but not quite. 

It has the same freckles that look like Perseus and Sagittarius if he squints at them just right, tilts his head when the sun hits it right. It has the same laugh, the same crinkle of the nose, the same slightly uneven teeth, the same mess of red hair and the same perpetually bruised knuckles, scraped kneecaps, flushed ears, loping walk. After a while, everyone else forgets that it’s an impersonator. Everyone else, sore from missing him, accepts it as a replacement.

But Dick will always know how different it really is from the boy who’d laughed in the face of the sun. It doesn’t say Dick’s name precisely the same way, and it strides around with its spine just an angle straighter than it should be, and its eyes are not green; they are a cold and deep yellow, like amber, encroaching any ragged scraps of Wally that may be left in the vessel that is now his body. 

“Hey, buddy,” it says to him one day, sitting down beside him. 

He spits on it, stands, and walks away. 


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Bart is actually a Reach agent sent back to get Jaime on mode"

“Why?” Dick wheezes out, his arms crossed over his throbbing ribs. The floor of the Watchtower is cold beneath his cheek and he’s pretty sure that some of his teeth are broken. Getting slammed in the face with a hammer made of Scarab armor can do that to a guy, he supposes.

Bart’s laugh sounds amused, and entertained, as much of a harmless guffaw as it had been when he’d first wreaked mischief on the Cave just a few months ago. Dick tries to lift his head to see why he can’t hear Wally breathing anymore, but it’s too much of a strain. 

“Come on, dude, why do you think?” Bart replies, zipping past. “Because you’re all full of yourselves. You seriously think your existence matters in the grand scheme of the universe? You seriously think all that meat down there’s gonna make any difference in this world? I told you why.” 

“Tell him again,” Jaime eggs him on, his voice perhaps an octave lower than it used to be. 

Dick can finally see Bart again, sliding to a halt in front of him. His suit is still on stealth mode. M’gann lies broken behind him. Dick hopes that, wherever Tim is, he isn’t afraid. He hopes that Conner is there for him. He hopes that Artemis and Kaldur are at least in the same room somewhere out there. He hopes that the Justice League will, somehow, find somewhere to go if they ever make it off Rimbor. 

“I lived the future, bro,” Bart tells him simply, his green eyes sparkling with feigned mirth. “Every day, I dragged myself through that. Through being kicked around by the Reach, through watching my family and friends die in front of me, new one every day, probably, I kinda lost count; never liked math – but Nightwing,  _think about it_. When the Reach came to me and asked me to get Beetle on mode, to ensure the loop that keeps him under their control, ‘course I wanted to say no. But it was an escape. I figured, no matter what I’m going back for – I’m going back. I’m getting away. They told me I could stay here, and I’d be dead by the time their future rolled around. I was helping the universe. Bigger picture and all. And you know what they made me understand?”

He leans down, so that his face is maybe an inch from Dick’s. His frivolous grin is a sickening contrast to the severity of his words.

“That it’s all your faults,” he hisses. “It’s all of you meta-meat’s faults for not  _stopping_  the Reach when you had the chance.”

“Then… why not use your ticket back here to – try to change things?” Dick asks him quietly. 

Bart shrugs, and stretches his arms over his head. Jaime is smirking behind him. 

“Because I’d rather die than forgive you,” he finally says. “All of you. My stupid creep of a cousin included. He’s dead, by the way. I figured I’d give you that memo. But really, I’d rather destroy this whole world than see you screw it up. This is a surefire way to make sure the future never happens, isn’t it? By erasing all hope of a future at all.”

He laughs again. “Pretty smart, right?” 

Jaime’s smirk is gone.

“Wait a minute,” he snarls. “What are you—”

But Bart has already zipped away from him. Dick watches, as if in slow motion, as Bart flickers his buzzing fingers over the self-destruct button, enters the authorization code that he’d found at Barry’s house, and slams his fist down on the red detonation button. Dick closes his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see Bart subdue Jaime, force him to stay aboard the vessel as it explodes.

The Watchtower has no countdown. Dick knows this. He wonders if the fragments of it that tear the Earth apart will make a sound in space. 

He’s glad that they won’t see it coming. 


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Conner/M'gann, as the Light's protegés"

Neither of them have ever seen any point in speaking aloud. When Queen Bee presents her new protegée at a social meeting, no one blinks, but Conner stares from his spot standing beside Lex Luthor, stares at the green-skinned girl’s short-cropped black hair, her fiery eyes, the hood of her cloak always shadowing her pretty face. 

Conner can break necks with one hand, but he has never seen something so fragile. She can sense him second-guessing her and she looks him in the eye sharply, and her mind shoots into his like a needle, an injection, and he flinches. 

 _I could kill you right now, standing here, without even moving_ , her thoughts echo harshly in his temples.  _But I won’t. Do you speak_ _?_

 _I do not_ , Conner thinks back carefully, still unaccustomed to the idea of contractions. The genomorphs had taught him no such skill. 

 _Neither do I_ , her mind whispers.  _I don’t see the point. Your mind smells like death._

 _There is a lot of it in here_ , he replies.

A pause.

 _I like your tee-shirt_ , she thinks.

Conner glances down at the plain black cotton and frowns.

_You do?_

_Yes. I will enjoy killing people with you, I think._

_Why are you with Queen Bee?_

_How dare you ask. I will not tell you, Superboy of Cadmus._

_I like the name Conner_ , he lets loose before he can refrain.  _It reminds me of a boy on TV._

Silence for a moment.

 _Then I will call you Conner_ , she finally agrees.  _I am M’gann._

 _M’gann_ , Conner tests it, then, in a whisper, “M’gann.” 

It is the first word he has ever spoken aloud, the first word to be worth it. 


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick's death was faked instead of Artemis's"

“It was necessary.” 

Barbara looks up from her wringing hands to gaze at Dick with eyes that she’s sure are empty. Just a few hours ago, she’d broken a packet of fake blood over his torso, felt his heartbeat slow beneath her palm, given him what has to be sloppiest CPR she’s ever had to fake. And now he’s standing in front of her, beside Kaldur, with a golden stud in his ear whose stone shines with an uncanny light. 

“I know it was,” she murmurs. “You don’t need to remind me.” 

Tim glances between her and Dick like he’s expecting something. He’d dialed Wally West’s cell number into Barbara’s phone three hours ago, lingered helplessly behind her as she’d had to tell the speedster that his best friend had been killed. She’d heard a strange, agonized noise that had sounded like a howl, and Artemis had taken the phone, and Barbara, forcing back the tightness in her throat, had repeated her monologue again. 

“And so,” Kaldur murmurs. “Only we four know the secret?” 

Dick nods in Barbara’s place. “Yes. And it’s going to have to stay that way.” 


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Conner/M'gann, where she is the clone and he is the alien"

They had found her in July. Metropolis had been sunny and hot and the grass had crawled along the park hills, verdant and glimmering and warm (like her skin). Kon-El had heard about every detail from the rambling Kid Flash, whose wide green eyes had practically sparkled with excitement at reliving that afternoon, and still the story seemed distant and incomplete – the speed with which it is always recounted, the whirling thrill, repeatedly leaves him bewildered.

He didn’t meet her until two weeks later (Robin mentioned something about her staying with Artemis, another who Kon-El had barely gotten to know since he had landed in Smallville in April, searching for Superman, for Earth, for living). He had been standing on the platform atop the mountain with the salty air crawling over his shoulders when Kid Flash had tapped his shoulder, beaming enthusiastically, and told him that they had a  _visitor_.

A visitor, Kon-El would eventually learn, who had been engineered by the scientists of Cadmus to serve them, to spread the awareness of interplanetary beings on Earth, and to one day replace the Martian Manhunter:  _Megan_ , as Artemis had offered to call her. Kon-El did not know all of the details of her origin, or of her powers, but he had not seen anything quite like her on this strange new planet in the three short months that he had been there – he had not seen someone so silent, so distant, or so magnetic. He had not seen hair so red, nor eyes so bright, nor skin so green (the grass, he would always think; the grass). He had not felt such a presence in his consciousness as the one she so tentatively left there, lingering quietly like the edges of the evening, desperately seeking a way to understand. He had not seen someone look at him the way she did: with such wondering. He had not seen anything, he realized when Megan walked into the living room, limping slightly. He had not seen anything at all.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Tye/Asami, college AU"

Tye groans, stretching his legs out in the space that the crammed-in desks give him. His foot accidentally hits the wheel of the seat in front of him, but he doesn’t care, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. 

He thuds the toe of his sneaker against the same wheel, humming to himself, and it takes maybe thirty seconds for the occupant of the chair to turn and face him.

He blinks at her. Her black hair is tied into a short tuft of a ponytail, and there’s a green wool headband that covers her ears (no doubt to ward off the cold, he speculates), and she’s looking at him with more confusion than annoyance. 

“Yo,” he greets her, raising a hand in greeting. “I heard this class was an easy skate for a language requirement. You know if that’s true?”

She frowns at him, and blinks, and opens and closes her mouth a few times before grimacing.

“Sumimasen?” she offers. 

He stares at her.

“Is – this a test?” he finally replies. “Because this is only like, first year Japanese; I don’t speak it.” 

She shrugs a little and shakes her head, still looking perplexed. 

“Gomen’nasai,” she tells him before turning back around. 

Tye blinks at the back of her head for a good few seconds.

“Uh, yeah, konichiwa, good talk,” he mutters before crossing his arms and sinking down into his chair. 


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis. Artemis can see and hear ghosts. Wally was murdered in the 1920s and haunts her new bedroom."

“What’s in there?” he asked at her shoulder, but when she turned to glare at him, he was already floating over the other one. “What’s that? What the heck  _is_  that?” 

Artemis slammed the suitcase shut with both hands, which made him jump. Or, well, float a couple of inches higher. She had to resist the compulsion to smooth down the goosebumps on her arms – just the fact that he was even that close to her was making the entire room temperature drop, but asking her mother to turn up the heat would result in immediate narrowed eyes and shouts of “Again?!”, and she really wasn’t in the mood to deal with that on her first day in Happy Harbor. 

“Was that  _underwear_?” the spectre prodded her, and Artemis squinted at him out of the corners of her eyes. His skin was pallid and filmy, but she could discern permanent freckles on it, which she supposed were a typical supplement for his poorly combed sepia-red mop of hair. “Hot  _dog_.” 

“ _Yes_ ,” Artemis ground out.

He shook his head immediately, pinching his eyebrows together skeptically, and declared, “Bushwa.”

“Will you leave me alone?” Artemis said as civilly as she could. “I’m sure you’ve been  _super bored_  being dead all these years, but I’d like to at least unpack before I have to deal with you.” 

“You mean you don’t want to hear my life story?” he said with a grin, propping his chin up with his hand and waggling his eyebrows. “It’s a great story. I had a best friend and a favorite color and _all_ the good stuff. And just wait’ll you hear how I died.” 

“Save it, Casper,” Artemis barked, trying to shoo him away with one hand. “Go tell your life story to a wall for all I care.” 

At the word “wall,” his smile vanished, replaced by a perplexed frown, and he opened his mouth as if to speak but blinked and closed it again. Artemis loosened as his expression began to look increasingly frustrated, and he scratched his head thoughtfully, his brown furrowing deeper. 

“What?” she finally prompted him. 

“I just—” He gulped, but it made no sound. “I feel like I know that word. Y’know, in a sense that isn’t just… what it is.” 

“Uh,” Artemis replied. “Okay, sure.” She paused before sighing. “What’s your name?”

At that, he shrugged. “Don’t know nothing from nothing about that.”  

“Great,” Artemis grumbled, finally turning away from him and throwing her hands in the air. “That’s just great, kid. You’re making this  _really_  easy for me.” 

“So’s your old man,” he snapped back. When she whirled around to retort, he was perched on top of her desk with his arms folded and his knees bent at his chin. 

“Whatever,” she huffed, making a curt gesture of dismissal at him. “Just don’t pull any Ghostbusters shower crap, okay?” 

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” he told her. “Therefore, I can make no promises.”

Artemis ran her hand over her face.

“‘We’ll move somewhere quiet, Artemis,’” she muttered under her breath. “‘It’ll be nice, Artemis! Normal, Artemis! No more ghosts, dear! What could go wrong?’”

She’d have to start making a list.  


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "A _Young Justice_ / _Community_ AU, with a paintball twist"

  
“Dick!” Wally whoops, dragging Roy in through the doorway. “Guess who I found out in the neutral zone!” 

Dick turns around and Roy has to contain an incredulous stare. He’s decked out in goggles and padding and several rounds of paint balls (how he managed to throw those together, Roy will never know). 

“Roy Harper,” he exclaims with a wide grin that eerily likens him to a shark. “So you made it through! Good; we could use some more soldiers.”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Roy demands, staring between the two of them as Wally goes to pick up a neon yellow paintball gun. “I just fell asleep on the couch in the study room! And then Kaldur tried to attack me in the hallway! And then this idiot—” He points to Wally, “Came running around the corner and did a freaking somersault off the wall and you people are insane!” 

Dick narrows his eyes, and Wally halts, turning with astonished eyes back to Roy.

“You mean you—” Wally glances at Dick, who frowns at him, and then to Roy again. “You don’t know?” 

“Oh my god, just tell me,” Roy groans, throwing his hands in the air. 

“Roy, buddy,” Dick says quietly, his shoulders going slack. “We’re at war.” 

Roy makes what has to be the most ridiculously disbelieving face possible, waving his hands at either side of his head in sheer incredulity. 

“What the  _fu_ —”

“Actually, we kiiiinda started it,” Wally inserts with a wince. “Dick and I were just minding our own business, having a casual paintball fight, but then I guess I accidentally hit Artemis with a pink one, and she got so mad that she kind of… backflipped? And almost killed me? And then they got guns because Raquel does this stuff in her spare time, or something. And basically everyone in the group hates us right now since we got paint on all of their stuff. So it’s us against them, basically.” He grins. “We’re totally winning.” 

Roy gapes at the two of them for quite a long time. Eventually, he settles on exactly the right words to convey his feelings on the matter.

“I’m going home,” he says, and with that, he wheels around and flings the door open, despite Wally and Dick’s hectic shouts of “NO DON’T OPEN THE—”

Instantly, the barrel of a pink paintball gun is pressed right to his forehead. At the end of the arm holding it is none other than Raquel, smirking triumphantly up at him, flanked by Zatanna and Artemis, whose weapons are pointed at Dick and Wally, respectively. 

“Ladies,” Raquel says with a cocked eyebrow. “I think we found ‘em.”


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Young Justice, _Ghostbusters_ AU"

“The ectoplasmic energy is off the  _charts_  in here!” Dick exclaimed with far too much crazed enthusiasm for it to be normal, pushing his goggles onto his forehead and gaping at his blinking energy reader.

“That’s fantastic,” Wally muttered, still attempting to wipe residual green goop out of his hair, grimacing. “Let’s memorialize it.”

“Shhh,” Kaldur hushed Wally, clapping a hand over his mouth and squinting suspiciously around the cobweb-laced hallway. “We must not anger it further.”

“It’s a tiny green glob!” Wally shouted, shoving Kaldur away. “What’s it gonna do if it gets angry? Puke on us? Oh, wait!” He let out a sarcastic gasp, pointing to himself. “Already done!”

“Come on out, you little tub of paranormal lard!” Roy bellowed to the ceiling, switching on his proton pack and pointing the nozzle out belligerently. “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!”

“I’d take the demon in the fridge over you losers any day,” Wally growled, turning on his pack readily. “Let’s get this over with; I’ve got a date.”


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Dick/Babs, in which Babs finds out about Dick's plan"

Barbara’s hands shake over the keyboard, much to her chagrin. She blinks up at the glowing screen with wide, slightly wet eyes, refusing to allow herself to blink as if for fear that it will eradicate the text in front of her.

“ **ARTEMIS CROCK**  —  _UNDERCOVER_ :  ** _CONFIDENTIAL_**  — ISSUED ALIAS:  _TIGRESS_  — LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS: ATLANTIC OCEAN — LAST KNOWN STATUS: ALIVE”

“ **KALDUR’AHM**  —  _UNDERCOVER:_   ** _CONFIDENTIAL_**  — NO ISSUED ALIAS — LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS: ATLANTIC OCEAN — LAST KNOWN STATUS: CATATONIC”

She’s been working to penetrate the protective encryptions since last night, relentlessly clawing apart Dick’s lies and secrecy with every digital trick she knows, driven to the snooping by his peculiar behavior, his bitterness, his haggard appearance. 

She curls her fingers into fists and those shake, too. She hears one of the entrances to the Batcave slide open with a whir, what seems like miles away. She leaves every one of the windows open on the monitor, every changed face and clipped fabrication, and she sets her jaw and waits. 

“Hey, Babs; I just came by to—”

Dick halts behind her, his voice plunging off into silence. She doesn’t move.

“Oh shit,” he whispers, broken and exhausted and scraped down to the bone. 

Barbara turns in the chair, her cowl heavy at the back of her neck, and stares up at him, bewildered, her eyebrows twitching in forlorn astonishment over her eyes. 

“How long did you plan on keeping this from us?” she murmurs. 

“I’m sorry,” Dick offers her, and nothing else, his head bowed as though he’s been waiting for her to say those words, waiting for her to pull up those files. 

Barbara surges to her feet and punches him in the jaw, barely grazes him, really, but he stumbles back, the mug in his hand falling to the ground and shattering. She stands, her shoulders heaving, out of breath though she hasn’t moved in what feels like days. 

“Do you even realize,” she rasps, “what you’ve done to yourself? This is  _him_ , Dick. This is  _him_. You’re him.” 

“No,” Dick protests, his hand clutching at his chin, his eyes focused on the stone ground. “No, no, this is different; it’s just – it’s all  _necessary_ , Babs; I had no choice!” 

“You had the choice of your teammates!” Barbara shouts back, shrill with aching. “You had the choice of doing this  _together_ ; you had the choice of not closing yourself off to the people who want to help you! This isn’t  _your_  fight, Dick; it’s all of ours.  _All of ours_. When did you forget that?” 

Dick sighs out raggedly, half a sob.

“I don’t know,” he croaks.

Barbara shakes her head, blinking back tears.

“I don’t either.”


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Wally/Artemis, 1950s Minnesota"

“So you’re new around here, aren’tcha?” 

Artemis scowls out of the corner of her eye at the boy standing beside her at the bus stop, keeping the grip on her beaten leather book satchel as tight as she can. She’d been hoping that, being in such an out-of-the-way neighborhood, she wouldn’t have company during her morning waits for the school bus. 

He’s smiling at her, freckled and skinny and clearly dressed in his first-day-of-school clothes, a white cotton button-down with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pair of blue jeans, Ray Bans concealing his eyes. 

“Yes,” she finally replies. She hadn’t cared to wear the usual dress and petticoat that the school dress code demanded, instead adopting a pair of jeans folded at the ankle, her sister’s beaten Chuck Taylors, a bright-red blouse tied at the waist. She knows the school’s going to read her the riot act for it, but she’ll consider it a worthwhile opening for her sophomore year. 

“Knew it.” He grins. “So what brings you to the thriving metropolis Bigfork?” 

Artemis grimaces. Bigfork, Minnesota. She’s been hearing the lilting accents on every street corner, and this chattery kid is no different. She hadn’t expected the cadence to charm her, but it has, like she’s being sung to every time someone says hello. 

The summer heat buzzes, humid, leaving the grass an impossible bright green. Gnats mill in every shaft of sunlight. 

“Parents wanted the small city life,” she replies back in as clipped a tone as she can manage. “I’m not a fan.” 

“Jeez, I was just askin’,” he exclaims, throwing his hands up. “It’s a great town, y'know. It’s got  _me_ , after all.” 

Artemis shoots him a sour, unimpressed glare just as the bus splutters up. He’s still beaming at her, like he’s just won something. 

“And who are  _you_ , then?” she asks, waiting for the doors to open.

He flicks his sunglasses onto his forehead with one finger and Artemis’s chest twinges at the shocking green eyes that the action reveals. 

“Wally West, at your service,” he replies, bowing. 

Artemis scoffs at him and breezes past, clambering onto the bus. 


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wally/Artemis, in which Artemis and Wally never make up after "Insecurity" (unprompted)

“Looks good on you,” Wally says in a far more strangled voice than she’d been expecting. 

Once, Artemis wears a dress. It’s green like pine trees and the underskirt is umber like paths under sequoias and it goes down to her grazed knees. Her stockings snag on the scabs.

There are no sleeves. Her shoulders sigh out like hills and the the back of her neck feels unusually warm, but it’s only because her hair is down; she’s sure of it. 

“Thanks,” she says, shooting Wally an askance look out of the corner of her eye. M’gann had dusted her eyelids in evergreen with silver edges. “Figured the occasion called for it.”

Wally tugs at the hem of his pale yellow dress shirt, chewing on his already wind-worn lip. League functions had never been his favorite. The Watchtower’s lights set off the red in his hair to the point that it reminds her of firecrackers. 

“Can you believe Batman invited the whole Team to this stinkin’ thing?” Robin giggles from between them, striding by with a champagne glass filled with grape soda. His suit fits him far too appropriately. “Slay me.” 

“Ugh, me first,” Artemis groans, dropping her head back.

Anything to get away from Wally, honestly. Not that the last few weeks since he’d called her insecure and selfish haven’t been a dazzling foundation for conversation or anything, but she doesn’t like standing in her high heels.

She’d rather watch Ollie and Barry dance a jig around each other on the meeting table, which – oh. Hey. They are.

“I’m gonna go,” she grumbles, running a hand through her hair and clenching her jaw when she finds no tangles to distract her.

She swivels around and the sole of her shoe squeaks on the floor. Rocket is attempting to teach Conner and Kaldur how to krump a few feet away. M’gann’s face is covered in tears from her laughter. 

Zatanna isn’t there.

Artemis ducks her eyes. Dr. Fate’s gold helmet glints when he turns his head.

“Safe travels,” Dick sniggers, taking a swig of his soda. Artemis takes a step forward but suddenly there are fingers, warm and unsure, grasping her wrist, pressing right into her pulse.

“Artemis,” Wally says. 

She turns just slightly. The dress rustles. Wally hasn’t let go of her; his cheeks are starting to blend in with his hair and the only thing she can really distinguish are his eyes, green and wide (andclenchedaroundtheedgeswithspiteandstone).

A few seconds tick between them. She hears Batman’s low murmur, far away, for what seems like ages.

Wally lets go of her.

“Looks nice on you,” he mutters, and then he and Robin have walked away. 

Wally doesn’t hear her tell him to go fuck himself. She thinks she can see the moon changing phases outside. 


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "spitfire, set during the american revolution. wally is a patriot confronting artemis's loyalist father."

“My father said there was a Whig he’d tied up in the barn,” the girl muttered curiously, standing over him with her hair trailing down her shoulder in one thick blonde braid. “He didn’t say you would be a loggerhead.” 

“I have not even opened my mouth,” Wally retorted, wincing at the throbbing in the back of his head from the bruise that the butt of the musket Lawrence Crock had used to subdue him had left there. “You have no right to be calling me names.” 

She pursed her lips and set her candle down on one of the wooden stools, slightly hiking up the skirt of her nightgown and hunkering down to his height. The ropes at his wrists cut into his skin and the post to which he’d been tethered pressed discomfort into his spine. 

“You must be worth something,” she mused. In the candlelight, and on closer inspection, he could see that her features were aggressively delicate, her sharp gray eyes like pewter. “Otherwise he would have killed you the second he saw you.” She slid her gaze pensively to the splotch of red on his shirt. “A Whig wearing cotton and breeches like a farm boy. Imagine.” 

“A Torie standing in front of me without spitting on me,” he retorted, his side aching from where Crock had grazed him with his knife. “Imagine.” 

Her eyes flashed back up to his, explosive. 

“Don’t you dare call me that,” she snarled. “I’m nothing like him.” 

“Prove it,” Wally challenged her. 

She frowned at him, in a way so discerning and blunt that it made his bones feel taut, and then, from nowhere, she produced a small silver blade. Wally immediately tried to scramble back, his legs kicking against the hay. 

“Wait—” he stuttered out. “Wait.”

“Tell me why you are here,” she demanded. “To kill him?” 

Wally swallowed, looked her in the eye, and nodded, once. The confession would likely earn him death, but he’d always been a terrible liar. 

She considered him with narrowed eyes before moving swiftly toward him, and he winced, expecting pain, expecting blood, but instead there was a sawing at the ropes on his wrists and they slackened, plucked themselves apart, and he was free. He rolled his shoulders back into place and groaned at how they ached, and he rubbed at the raw lines over his skin.

“You’ll have to do better at it,” she said, “than that.” 

Wally opened his mouth to speak again but when he lifted his head, he saw her stand and whisk the candle away, plunging the barn into darkness again, the white of her nightgown rustling in the black as she slipped back out the creaking door, to the sound of the owls and the cicadas, to the stars beating a pulse into the empty summer night. 


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dick/Zatanna, "accidentally arrested and meet in jail AU"

“You know, if you pace intensely around that cell any more, you’re going to wear a trench in the floor.” 

Dick sways to a halt, one foot still poised above the ground, and looks through the bars on the opposite side of his cell. 

Leaning against them, in the cell beside him, is a girl. Her hair is practically black and her eyes are a mischievous blue and she’s smirking at him in a way that either makes him incredibly uncomfortable or incredibly intrigued. Her black tights are torn at the knees, both of which have fresh scrapes on them, but the rest of her form-fitting black clothes are in fine condition. 

“That’s the idea, y’see,” he replies. “I can dig a tunnel, have a breakout – it’ll be all over the news. You want in?” 

She snorts and leans away, bracing her hands on her hips. 

“Nah, thanks,” she says. “So. Come here often? Can I buy you a drink? Actually, I can’t; I’m like three years underage. But I can buy you some peanuts, maybe.” 

Dick can’t help laughing, immediately and mercifully forgetting about his night of vandalism and mayhem and smart-mouthing in the presence of police officers. This is much better than the foaming meth addict he’d imagined he’d be neighbored with for the night. 

“I love peanuts,” he bandies back, approaching the bars. Upon closer inspection, he can see a hickey on her neck. He raises his eyebrows. “Uh, big night?” 

She purses her lips and blithely tosses some of her hair out of her face. “Oh, yeah. Lots of fun. And now I get to wind down in a jail cell and party like it’s 1868. There is literally a spittoon in the cell next to mine; I kid you not.”  

“As much as I love spittoons,” Dick says, resting his elbow against one of the bars, “I’m way better at the small talk. For example, what is your phone number?” 

She snickers and, to his horror, turns away, flicking her hand at him. 

“Sorry, pretty boy. I’m saving my one phone call for someone special. Like… Pizza Hut.” 

Dick raises an eyebrow. He likes her already. 

**Author's Note:**

> Nearly all of these are the result of Tumblr prompting, but I'm cross-posting them here for better organization.


End file.
